Genuine conversations don’t happen on Zoom, Twitter, or Slack. Nor do they occur around a dinner table or across a desk.
Here’s what I mean: The location of our eyes, ears, and mouth is incidental compared with where our “head is at;” Our “head space” is where we have a meeting of the minds, not our GPS location. We all know this, and use spatial language like:
“He’s got his head in the clouds.”
“They can’t see the forest for the trees.”
“Let me speak from the heart.”
We complain: “I just can’t see where they’re coming from” or “How can you not see this?!”
But as the modern world shatters our shared worldviews, we increasingly “talk past each other,” fighting unwinnable battles over invisible turf.
A Game Board for Life
This summer, I paused writing essays to explore live chaos mapping in small groups. Mapping together felt like playing an engaging board game that surfaced real-life insights.
So in this next series of essays, I’ll combine live mapping learnings into a gameboard-style guide to the Chaos Map.
Borders
There’s an order and chaos to everything: from our personal development, to a work project, to the arc of history. Likewise, relational and conceptual heart and mind spaces exist within our friend group, work team, and the culture at large.
The specific descriptions, scale, and players vary, but the patterns are the same. For this introductory visual guide, I’ll narrow the borders somewhat to worldviews — the various, often conflicting ways we see the world.
We’ll explore each space in depth in later essays. Today, I’ll share a brief fly-over of each of the six spaces as an orientation.
I. Normland
We enter Normland wherever there’s an “us” and “others” in view — as we step into a holiday gathering or scroll down a social feed. It’s the primary space of our church, club, or pub. Here, we “fit in” or get punished for “acting out.” We’re “in sync,” “vibing” with, or are “disconnected” — all feelings that move us to act before we name them as feelings like shame, desire, loneliness, or belonging. We don't require a rulebook where we can blush or a financial incentive to act right where we might attract a mate. We instinctively dance along or face the music.
Plays in Normland
Remember: Pass on values for proper behavior through a social memory more potent than any history book — memorials, memes, rituals, brands, fashions, and traditions.
Preserve: Attack threats to the hard-fought social structures our ancestors developed through blood, sweat, and tears — our communal immune system.
Place: Carve out black-and-white borders between the in-group and out-group and develops a stable social hierarchy.
Worldviews in Normland:
Conservatism, fundamentalism, nationalism, patriotism, fandom, puritanism, literalism, authoritarianism, fascism, moralism, traditionalism, royalty, patriarchy/matriarchy, folk, family values, religion, collectivism, Luddism, Christian Nationalism, MAGA, populism,…
A social order creates stability, but also a volatile social hierarchy that may quickly spiral into unchecked power, witch hunts, and tribal wars when not rooted by less personal conceptual order. Then, we enter:
II. Systemland
Conceptual Order
Systemland is an escape the drama and excess of Normland above the surface. We extract patterns from our dramatic, fickle, and dangerous experiences into impersonal and timeless abstractions. These conceptual patterns patch the holes in our social fabric — instead of a skin-to-skin battle, we can refer to an agnostic rule, scientific fact, or a formula that works the same today as it will 10,000 years from now.
Plays in Systemland:
Abstract: transform temporal, volatile social patterns into reliable laws, systems, facts, and tools.
Prove: objectively measure what actually is and works without the interference of sentiments, charismatic actors, or unfalsifiable beliefs.
Mechanize: transform abstractions using other abstractions — code, grammar, physics — into technologies that alter reality.
Worldviews in Systemland:
1Rationalism, libertarianism, stoicism, nominalism, intellectualism, systematic theology, modernism, empiricism, capitalism, meritocracy, skepticism, technocracy, secularism, materialism, behaviorism, utilitarianism,...
While eternally in tension, a robust relational and conceptual order is the foundation of society and where we spend most of our lives and thoughts. But no matter how right, correct, or robust, it must evolve or it will devolve into a destructive and fragile tyranny. We evolve the order of our lives when we step towards Chaos:
Guide note: We're now leaving the safe shore of order into the unknown potential of chaos; From the forest floor to the tree level. Up here, the air is thinner but the views are intoxicating. We can trace vague, but broad patterns and possibilities invisible from the grounded reality of most of life. But staying up here too long is risky — we may lose any amount of time, energy, and money exploring unproven patterns that we'll never bring back to reality.
III. Cultureland
Emerging Relational Order
Here we find new, incomplete social patterns: Bleeding-edge causes, spiritual practices, revolutionary movements, art forms, memes, and other expressions of social progress. It’s a dramatic, artful mess of experimental ways of relating beyond what's permitted by the tradition or mainstream pop culture of Normland. As an emergent space, the patterns here are a broad-brushed, mixed bag of social impulses, most of which will never come to pass; But a few just might change everything for the better.
Plays in Cultureland:
INVERT: Flip the status quo to reveal absurd social dissonances and provocatively advocate for flipping the social hierarchy and norms.
AMPLIFY: Dial up the volume to expand what kinds of expression are permitted in polite, normal society — especially expressions that are overlooked and suppressed by the social order.
REFORM: Translate ideals and expressions into advocacy for actionable changes to the current social order.
Worldviews in Cultureland:
2Punk rock, anarchism, marxism, (new) progressivism, critical theory, collectivism, social justice, Antifa, moral relativism, humanism, postmodernism,...
Innovationland
Emerging Conceptual Order
Here we find emerging and unproven theories and technologies that seek to replace or expand our existing technology, laws, and accepted knowledge. The half-baked ideas here are a messy mix of brash, naive, and brilliant — and there's no telling which is what in the short term.
Plays in Innovationland:
IMAGINE simulates future events and ideas in our imagination and builds new tools and systems that advance them without evidence.
BET puts reputation, money, and time on the line to bring an imaginary idea to reality.
FORGE shapes and hones raw ideas and integrates them as upgrades to existing technology, science, and systems.
Worldviews in Innovationland:
3Effective altruism, silicon-valley-tech-optimism, systems thinking, heterodoxy, metamodernism, simulation theory, transhumanism, singularity theory, …
Leaving all gravity. This is your guide once more. As we move into Chaos — the space where we only find wonderful or terrible unknown possibilities. We only get whiffs of patterns that dissipate as quickly as they appear. They might explain everything or nothing. For all the hallucinations of beauty and meaning we see, we'll almost certainly come back down with nothing to show and risk floating into delusion all the while. We're entirely outside the atmosphere of known patterns. It's beautifully deadly.
Visionland
Relational Chaos
This galaxy view reveals cosmic-level relational patterns. The people and cultural patterns of the past, present, and future collapse into a grand but incoherent vision. It sounds like "crazy talk" — vague, divergent, and strange expressions that only the most galaxy-brained can follow. Most never even see — let alone enter this space — although we may roll our eyes at it from a distance. The encounters here aren't materially real, yet they feel more real than any possible experience from our five senses.
Plays in Visionland:
TRANSCEND pulls away from existing social patterns, leaving instincts, culture, and our own identity to see a holistic unity encompassing the whole of life, space, and time.
PROPHESY warns and inspires with dramatic, ecstatic, and impossible-to-ignore visions misfit for all currently plausible order.
DISSOLVE sacrifices identity, reputation, and physical safety to pursue a transcendent ideal felt more intensely than any social or physical sensation.
Worldviews in Visionland:
There’s no consistent worldview here, only visions of a promised land or existential doom.
Meaningland (Coming Soon)
Conceptual Chaos
In our final corner, we grasp for intuitions that justify a meaning for everything all at once for all time. What explains the randomness and order? The pain and suffering from moving chaos to order over generations? Is there an underlying order other than that which we create (or is that the wrong question altogether)? What's the fundamental formula that might unfold everything in a universe?
Fantasize: imagine deeper meanings and future possibilities indistinguishable from science fiction (or madness).
Metatheorize: seek the patterns from which all others are derived — theories of everything.
Unbridle: arrive at new insight through unguarded, mad-scientist intuitions.
Worldviews in Meaningland:
Here, we find no coherent worldviews — only deep intuitions of ultimate purpose that may only be fantasies of a disordered imagination.
Up Next
Our team, project, or community functions best when we have a healthy mix of order and chaos — a balanced map. In order to accomplish this, everyone involved must respect the psychological place of themselves and others. The first step is to be more fully aware of what’s in each space.
In the next series of essays, we’ll zoom into each space and explore more of the characteristics, plays, and players. In the mean time, I’d welcome your thoughts.
Even the most objective worldviews entwine with relational patterns. After all, we adopt them to explain the world and our relationship to it. In Chaos Map physics, every relational pattern has a reflected, conceptual pattern existing in dynamic tension. The conceptual world abstractly mirrors the relational world while the relational world lives within the what the conceptual world creates.
Each worldview has its own relational and conceptual order. But once we step towards chaos into Cultureland or Innovationland, naming a worldview is a messy and incoherent task. This space is where worldviews are formed and reformed, not held to as unshakable doctrine (that happens later, to the east). The worldviews that I listed are sometimes relatively outside of the mainstream norms, but all have elements that are mainstream — even traditional — depending on the perspective we’re looking from.
See footnote above.